My company’s holiday party is tonight. It’s at one of my favorite places: the MET’s Temple of Dendur in the Egyptian wing. I love holiday parties: the decorations, the food and wine, the winter wardrobe of sweaters and corduroy. But most of all the cheer, the gathering of people at the darkest time of the year, faces illumined by twinkle lights and candles, giving trinkets and gifts to the people we love and cherish. That is what the holiday means to me in my adult life, acknowledging the Christian myths tied to it as they are important to my parents, while in my heart feeling a deeper Northern hemisphere tradition, one that underpins a rekindling of light in the winter darkness.
Which brings me to this ornament, a gift from a friend from a former life. I spent the first fifteen years of my life at my dad’s second parish, Rosemont Lutheran Church. And one of my friends during high school was Hayley Schellhaas. She was a year older and went to a different school–Saucon Valley, over the mountain–but her family was active in our church and she introduced me to another close friend from those years, Sandy Kalman. I went as Sandy’s date to their school’s winter formal one year. Her dad drove to Bethlehem to pick me up and take me back to Hellertown where she lived. The formal was at Lehigh’s Asa Packer campus on top of South Mountain, that building with the observation tower and the 360 degree view of the Lehigh and Saucon Valleys. There are many stories from this period of my life that I never tell: many of my friends were outside of my own high school, from my involvement with the Lutheran Youth Fellowship, of which I was President for a time. When my faith broke at age 18, I broke with many of those people and memories. And though the inscription on this ornament might seem trite, it is what the holiday now is for me: a time to cherish the gift of my loved ones in my life and this world.
